RUTHFULLY YOURS

Everything about the Clintons, both Hillary and Bubba, is a lie, including (to steal a memorable line from the author Mary McCarthy) the “a,” the “and,” and the “the.” Neither Bubba nor Hillary know how to tell the truth, but both of them are masters at spinning the lie.

The dump of some of Hillary’s official emails this week reveals just how she operated as the secretary of State, employing an old courtier to help her deceive and distort the facts about her role in hanging an American ambassador out to die in Benghazi.

Mrs. Clinton not only set up her own private communications network when she was the secretary of State, but established her own intelligence network, relying on Sidney Blumenthal, the old courtier and Clinton family field hand, a character assassin well known in Washington as “Sid Vicious.”

Pretty much everywhere one looks around the globe, American foreign policy in ‎the Obama administration appears to have produced a disaster area. As Bret ‎Stephens summarized this week in “Everything is awesome, Mideast edition,” Saudi Arabia has concluded it is now on its own versus Iran, the Islamic State group is doing a fine ‎job overrunning both Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and Iran is spitting in America’s face ‎with every announcement it makes. Of course, American officials say this is all for ‎show, and a new Iran will soon burst onto the scene, a full member of “the ‎community of nations,” say, like the new Cuba. Today, Iran announced than ‎inspections of any nuclear facilities would require 24 days advance notice. Of ‎course, no inspections will be allowed of military sites. When all its cash is freed ‎up from the end of virtually all sanctions, Iran presumably will have no reason not ‎to cheat on its nuclear program, but if they do, U.S. President Barack Obama tells us, sanctions will ‎be snapped back quickly. However, Iran will not be returning any of the money, ‎and Russia has made clear that international sanctions will not automatically ‎snapback in any case. So what exactly are the safeguards for our side in this ‎transaction?‎

I didn’t quite believe it when I heard that America’s commander-in-chief had addressed the graduating class of the Coast Guard Academy and delivered a speech about climate change. But it’s true:

This brings me to the challenge I want to focus on today — one where our Coast Guardsmen are already on the front lines, and that, perhaps more than any other, will shape your entire careers — and that’s the urgent need to combat and adapt to climate change.

What a bore this time of year is. There seems to be only a couple of topics the ever shrinking list of approved speakers get to talk about to America’s youth. So Obama droned on about climate change and Mann-boosting hack Bill Nye the Science Guy discoursed on race. Maybe someone switched their speeches.

Over at The Washington Free Beacon, Aaron MacLean kept a cool head about the President’s Warmageddon scenario:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/lloyd-billingsley/cair-boss-loses-in-california-race/print/

Basim Elkarra, executive director of the Sacramento chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), and a former member of the California Democratic Party’s executive board, has been defeated in his first run for public office [2]. An anonymous flier stirred some controversy during the race, but key background on Elkarra failed to emerge.

In late 2006, California Senator Barbara Boxer gave Basim Elkarra a certificate of appreciation “in recognition of his efforts to protect civil liberties and to build bridges among diverse communities in California.” The senator quickly revoked the award, explaining that her California office had not vetted CAIR sufficiently. In “Senators for Terror,” [3] Joe Kauffman charted CAIR’s connections to Islamic extremism, and cited evidence that, “Elkarra himself is a radical, apart from his connection to CAIR.” Elkarra had defended Lodi, California, imam Shabbir Ahmed, [4] who urged Pakistanis to wage jihad against Americans. Another local imam, Mohammed Adil Khan, was building a madrassa to recruit children for violent acts against the United States. Elkarra described Khan, who was later deported, as “a pioneer in interfaith work.”

It happens to everyone. One time I found $13 million under a sofa cushion. And don’t get me started on all the billions behind the maps of Cleveland in the glove compartment.

Come on, they’re only human [2].

The Clinton Foundation reported Thursday that it has received as much as $26.4 million in previously undisclosed payments from major corporations, universities, foreign sources and other groups.

The disclosure came as the foundation faced questions over whether it fully complied with a 2008 ethics agreement to reveal its donors and whether any of its funding sources present conflicts of interest for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins her presidential campaign.

The first priority of most Western governments today seems to sign a deal with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who openly calls for Israel’s and America’s destruction.

The next priority of many European governments, and apparently the Pope, is to entrust a state to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, a movement that does not hide its genocidal intentions.

Unless the Obama Administration and Congress stop Iran, we are about to witness the world’s next genocide, committed by Iran. By teeing up Iran’s nuclear capability and triggering a Middle East nuclear arms race, the U.S. and the negotiators of the P5+1 are creating conditions that can only lead to a disastrous war with catastrophic results.

The great columns and pediments of Washington, D.C. that give it a Roman and Greek air have their origins in a lost city in the Syrian desert. After Robert Wood and James Dawkins visited the ruins of Palmyra [2] in the eighteenth century, the illustrations of the bare columns and broken arches helped inspire neoclassical architecture. Now the city that helped inspire Washington is occupied by ISIS.

It is a historical irony that the classical architecture of our national capital where Islamic terrorists are appeased owes a good deal to a forgotten Christian outpost that surrendered to the armies of Islam.

Some would even say that history is repeating itself.

Palmyra fell when it was besieged by the savage horde of Khalid ibn al-Walid; the Sword of Allah. The Sword of Allah was known for numerous atrocities. One particularly gruesome account describes how he murdered the Arab poet and chieftain Malik ibn Nuweira for returning taxes demanded by Mohammed to his people, telling them, “Your wealth is now your own.” The Islamic IRS was even nastier than ours.

The Sword of Allah cut off Malik’s head and used it to cook dinner [3] before raping his wife. Through such atrocities, that helped inspire the modern crimes of ISIS, the Sword of Allah was able to keep Mohammed’s conquests together after his death. When he came to Palmyra, the Sword swore by Allah that he would conquer it even if it were in heaven and capture its sons and daughters.

A rather uneventful college commencement season full of the usual platitudes and bromides was shaken up by British novelist Ian McEwan’s refreshingly challenging the zeitgeist of trigger warnings, free-speech zones, and campus censorship at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania this week.

McEwan did not shy away from addressing the current temper on campus, choosing to focus on the creeping group-think in faculty lounges and discussion sections instead of the all too easy targets of Russian crackdowns on free speech or the “industrial scale” state-sponsored censorship in China. McEwan directly confronted the problem of a country rooted in the tradition of free expression under the First Amendment meekly submitting to what he called “bi-polar thinking” — the eagerness of some to “not side with Charlie Hebdo because it might seem as if we’re endorsing George Bush’s War on Terror.”

The good news for global-warming alarmists is that they can pretty much be guaranteed that there will always be something happening somewhere in the world to get alarmed about. “It has been a really bad week for the ice shelves of the quickly warming Antarctic peninsula,” the Washington Post’s resident alarmist Chris Mooney wrote a week ago. In a few years, a very warm summer will see the Larsen B ice shelf shatter into thousands of smaller icebergs, a researcher told him. However, Mooney did not report that the same team that had detected Antarctic warming also said that the warming had not been reproduced by climate models. “Until the past warming can be properly simulated, there is little basis for prediction that rapid warming will continue in future,” according to the British Antarctic Survey.

Neither does the alarm extend to the total area of ice floating on the seas surrounding Antarctic and the North Pole. There was a sharp recovery from the low recorded in 2012, and global sea-ice area is currently above the 1979–2008 average. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reckons that Antarctic sea ice has expanded at an average of 4.1 percent per decade since 1979. This slightly more than offsets shrinkage of the larger area of sea ice at the North Pole, which the NSIDC says has declined by 2.4 percent a decade.

Recent news of the Clintons’ $25 million jackpot in 2014 makes it tough for Hillary to push her core campaign theme with a straight face. Indeed, widespread laughter will greet her efforts to champion “everyday Americans” against those who allegedly make too much money.

“The deck is stacked for those at the top,” Hillary Clinton said Tuesday, not mentioning that her household income puts her in not just the top 1 percent of tax filers but the top 0.1 percent.

“There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker,” Clinton told Iowa voters last month. However, as Sean Davis noted Tuesday at TheFederalist.com, “she did not elaborate on whether there’s something wrong when non-CEOs who run tax-exempt organizations make 380 times more than the typical worker.”